BOSTON - Western Massachusetts community hospitals received nearly $2 million in grants from the state's Health Policy Commission, part of an effort to make the state's community hospitals more effective and cost-efficient.

The money is part of the Community Hospital Acceleration, Revitalization, and Transformation (CHART) program, which will provide $120 million over four years to community hospitals.

Iyah Romm, director of system performance and strategic investment for the Health Policy Commission, said the program is meant to help each hospital provide more efficient and effective accountable care.

"It's really intended to meet these hospitals where they are," Romm said. "They're at different phases of need, from financial need, geographic need, their populations are different….The grant program is structured to…help them be higher quality, lower cost organizations."

The first phase of funding, announced Wednesday, distributed $10 million, of which 20 percent went to hospitals in Western Massachusetts and 31 percent went to hospitals in central Massachusetts. Romm said the program was meant to provide money for community hospitals that typically are not eligible for larger federal grants.

By law, the hospitals must have lower prices than the statewide average, must be non-profits, and must not be teaching hospitals. Of 31 state hospitals that met those criteria, 28 applied for grants. The awards ranged from $65,000 to $500,000. The money comes from fees paid by insurance companies and certain health care providers with high assets and low percentage of public payers.

Chuck Gijanto, president of Baystate Regional Markets, who oversees Baystate Franklin Medical Center as well as Baystate Mary Lane Hospital in Ware, which received $499,600 for telemedicine equipment, said the hospitals already use telemedicine to assist stroke victims in the emergency room when a neurologist is not on call.

The grants will allow the hospitals to buy portable equipment that can give patients in different units access to a variety of specialists. For example, the hospitals are considering doing remote consults with specialists in cardiology, psychiatry and infectious diseases.

That means rather than transporting a sick patient to Baystate Medical Center, the patient can remain in a less expensive community hospital and consult with a specialist from there. Gijanto said that can save money and also free up beds in busier city hospitals. "That’s a whole new world for us," he said.

In addition, Gijanto said Baystate is looking at using grant money to tie private doctors in some of its smaller practices, such as in Ware and Greenfield, into Baystate Health's computer system, so that Baystate's hospitals and doctors can all share patient information.

Clark Fenn, senior vice president at Holyoke Medical Center, said the CHART grant there will be used to bring electronic medical records to the hospital's emergency room. Currently, most of the hospital's inpatient units, labs and X-rays use electronic health records. But emergency room doctors still write notes on paper, which must be transmitted by fax.

Fenn said switching to electronic records would make a big difference in the ability to quickly transmit notes from an emergency room doctor to a nursing unit or the patient's primary care physician. But, he said, "It’s a very heavy, expensive endeavor. It's been in our budget to do for quite some time without the resources to do that." With the grant, Fenn said, "We will move full speed ahead to make that happen."

The Health Policy Commission will monitor and evaluate the grant projects. A second round of grants will be distributed in the spring.